The present invention relates generally to web portals, and more specifically, to portlets that change size and position based on the surrounding portlets.
Web portals provide a means of delivering aggregated, personalized content to computer users. Typically, a portal server includes a portal program (e.g., WebSphere® Portal Server from International Business Machines Corp. (IBM) of Armonk, N. Y.—WebSphere® is a registered trademark of IBM), which obtains and aggregates portal content into a portal page. The portal page includes sections or visual portlets that each contain particular portal content formatted according to a user's preferences. A portal is a type of content framework which is designed to serve as a gateway, or focal point, for end users to access an aggregation or collection of information and applications from many different sources. For example, a user could establish his/her own portal page that has sections for news, weather and sports. When the page is requested, the portal program would obtain the portlets from the appropriate content providers.
A portal page is often structured in row and column format. The obtained portlets may be added to the portal page either statically or dynamically. In a static portal page, the administrator of the page determines the size and position of the portal based on its content or other parameters. For example, a particular portal page may only allow box scores and weather to be added to the left hand column while news may only be added to the right hand column. The end-user may be able to manually change the location of the specific portlet within each column (i.e., box scores followed by weather) but the user cannot change the size of the portlet or align items in each column together. In a dynamic portal page, the size and location of the portlet is based on the design constraints of the portal page itself. For example, the size of the portlet is based on the predetermined dimensions of the row and/or column. The end-user may again change the location of the portlet but may not change the size of the portlet or its alignment relative to other portlets.